Left-wing Scholars Rewriting History,
Affecting Court Decisions

Richard
Poe
November 10, 2003

David Bach is a warrior. A former Navy SEAL,
a Naval Reserve officer and a naval attorney with top-secret clearance,
Bach stands at the front lines of the War on Terror. Yet, on Sept. 25,
a federal judge forbade him to carry a gun in New York state. The
ruling is part of a growing trend. More and more federal judges today
contend that Americans have no  I repeat, no  constitutional right to
keep and bear arms.

How
did this happen? Simple. Left-wing historians and law professors have
been rewriting American history and reinterpreting the Constitution
for years. Now their work is bearing fruit. Anti-gun judges parrot the
lies their professors told them. With each stroke of their gavels, they
infuse those lies with the force of law.

David Bach lives in Virginia Beach but
visits his parents in Ulster County, N.Y. Denied a license to pack a
side arm during these visits, Bach sued in federal court. "[B]ecause of
my occupation within the Department of Defense and Naval Special
Warfare, I believe my family and I are at greater risk of being
targeted by those seek[ing] to carry out symbolic acts of terror," Bach
argued in court papers.

Bach
also invoked his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

No such right exists, said U.S.
District Judge Norman A. Mordue of Syracuse, N.Y. In his ruling, Judge
Mordue wrote, "[T]he court adopts the view that the Second Amendment is
not a source of individual rights."

Echoing
the lie taught in many law schools today, Mordue argued that the Second
Amendment secures only a "collective" right of state National Guard
units to bear arms in military service.

Constitutional scholar Stephen Halbrook says
that's baloney. Having argued and won three gun cases before the
Supreme Court, Halbrook is probably America's leading expert on gun
rights. In his book, That Every Man Be Armed,
Halbrook notes that, during the debate over the Bill of Rights in 1789,
Tench Coxe  a friend of James Madison  published a defense of the
proposed amendments in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette.
Coxe wrote that "the people are confirmed ... [by the Second Amendment]
in their right to keep and bear their private arms."

James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights,
applauded Coxe's article. Upon receiving a copy, Madison thanked his
friend for "the cooperation of your pen" in helping to explain the Bill
of Rights to the public.

Halbrook
writes:

Coxe's defense of the amendments
was widely reprinted. A search of the literature of the time reveals
that no writer disputed or contradicted Coxe's analysis that what
became the Second Amendment protected the right of the people to keep
and bear their "private arms." The only dispute was over whether a bill
was even necessary to protect such fundamental
rights.

Why, then,
do so many law professors teach exactly the opposite  that the Second
Amendment secures no individual right to keep and bear arms? Simple.
Many law professors are leftists who oppose gun rights. Therefore, they
lie to their students about the true meaning of the Bill of Rights.

"One will search the 'leading'
casebooks in vain for any mention of the Second Amendment," wrote
University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson in the Yale
Law Journal in 1989. Levinson accused the "elite bar" of
"sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns."

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe
scandalized academia in 1999 when he revised his treatise American
Constitutional Law  a standard text in law schools since
1978  and finally acknowledged the obvious; that the Second Amendment
secures an individual right to keep and bear arms. "I've gotten an
avalanche of angry mail from apparent liberals who said, 'How could
you?'" Tribe told USA Today.

Subsequent editions of Tribe's book now
carry the correction. But the book misinformed law students for 20
years.

In his ruling
against David Bach, Judge Mordue cited United States v. Miller (1939)  a
Supreme Court decision which leftists claim overruled individual gun
rights. In fact, it does just the opposite.

Not only does United States v. Miller confirm
citizen gun rights, but Levinson says it also strongly implies "that
the individual citizen has a right to keep and bear bazookas, rocket
launchers, and other armaments that are clearly relevant to modern
warfare."

It is time to
purge what Levinson calls the "elite bar" of liars and ignoramuses. Too
many Americans died to give us our Constitution. Will we surrender it
now to the whims of leftist judges and law professors?

Richard Poe is a New
York-Times best-selling author and cyberjournalist. His last
book, The Seven Myths of Gun Control, is now in
paperback and his forthcoming book, The New Underground: How
Conservatives Conquered the Internet, will be available soon.